Thursday, February 28, 2013

In trying to post anything here on Fruitless Pursuits (including this Thursday Threesome), I'll usually get yanked away because one of my 3 wonderful kids (ages 5, 2, and 2) is doing something crazy.

Here are a few examples of what they do:

#1. Pee on everything.
The two younger ones have a new thing that they learned from Gangnam Style.... it's called "shaking hiney". They'll do a butt dance and it's actually pretty funny. Everytime you change their pull-up they need to shake hiney. But now, it's gotten to ridiculous levels of every single morning, they wake up and the first thing they want to do is take off their pull up, run around and shake hiney. If I am not within a few feet to catch them, that's it.

They will run, shake hiney and pee on everything. The carpet. The couch. The bathroom floor. Their clothes. Me. Everything.

#2. Battle over iPads.
All three will fight over everything. Example: I give one twin a blue cup of milk, and give the other a red cup. Then the one with the red cup starts crying about the blue cup. So I switch and the other one cries. Then I'll ditch the red cup and give them both a blue cup, but they'll cry over the original blue cup. THEY ARE BOTH THE SAME!!! This is when it gets to the point where I choose the one who cries the loudest and give them the original blue cup.

But worse than the cups are iPads. We have enough to go around, yet they'll fight over the "monster pad" (an iPad in a cool child-proof orange monster case), the "black pad" (it's actually a white one in a black case), "Mom's pad"(my wife's brand new iPad which they aren't supposed to be using), or Dad's pad (my iPad mini that's 100% off limits). There are also iPhones and a new iPod touch. Yet they will fight for hours over which one to use and then once they settle down, all 3 will watch the same episode of Yo Gabba Gabba or Blues Clues on Netflix. This goes on 24 hours a day. And when a battery dies, it's absolute hell. But worse than that was when I didn't pay the cable bill and we had 2 days without internet... which meant 2 days without Netflix. It was brutal.

#3. Never Sleep.
There is barely an hour during the night where a child is not awake. They'll bounce off each other and rotate shifts in keeping the whole town awake. So in order to get my non-dayjob work done (things like posting here, working on board games, etc), I have to wake up REALLY early. So I'll wake up at 5am and the kids will already be awake and doing their normal daily routine: Fighting over iPads, peeing on everything, shaking hineys, spilling cups of milk on the couch and carpet and spreading it around like paint, drawing on the walls, tearing up paper, taking all of the pillows off of the couches, eating everything in the house without actually eating anything at all, calling people on my iPhone, emailing people screenshots of apps.